I had a cheap combined machine and it was absolute shit and broke down after a short time. Not advisable. Generally, separate machines work better.

I have a Roomba ;)

That isn't common in my area (western part of Germany). You typically have your own washer / dryer although there might be a specific room in the basement where everyone puts theirs. Many people have them in their kitchen or bathroom, though.

So you're not making green tea, then? ;)

You're talking about applets, he's talking about having an application server serve HTML. I suppose.

As the person responsible for packing our commercial desktop Java app and maintaining its installer, I suggest just bundling the JVM with your product, but not as its own Installed package but inside your installation. It takes a bit of additional hard drive space if every app has its own JVM but it saves so much confusion and different version failures. The end user also doesn't have to worry about the abysmal Oracle updater because our JVM is not registered to handle browser applets or other stuff, so that security risk is just not there.

LOL someone is butthurtz about my post and modded it off topic. I guess I'm going to need a bigger shotgun.

I only want to be the best that I can.

My mouth is stained.

Ah fuck it, you know what? Fuck you and your mother, I'm not getting paid enough to post this shit.

Hi Folks,
It's your regular neighborhood troll magic maverick , and I've got a small couple of requests for you.
1. In the firehose, vote down as offtopic anything that isn't related to the beta. Vote up anything that is related to the beta.
2. Join the boycott from 10th to 17th Feb. Demonstrate that without the commentators, /. will obviously die.

Cheers,
Now back to your regular scheduled trolling.

The reason so many people are "spamming" the comments section is to highlight how much comments actually matter to this website. At the moment people are coming and posting, but posting anti-beta stuff. Next week, well, with many fewer comments, the management ("no smoking or spitting") can compare and contrast the numbers. Perhaps they'll realize that it is actually the commentators that make the site, and not the "editors" (who can't edit for shit).

Dear Bruce,
Of all the /. commentators that I've seen discussing alternatives to /., you are probably the most trustworthy (not to say that the others aren't, but they don't have the profile that you have). Please make a /. alternative that takes all the best bits of /. (threaded comments, moderation and meta moderation, user accounts, but also anonymous posting, etc. etc.), throw out the crap (the troll posts that are basically the repeat of each other, perhaps something that can just compare a comment against another comment and say "this comment is too similar", try again), and add some goodies (e.g. Unicode), and done. I'll come and join your site. I'll even donate to make it happen.

Yours sincerely, /. user since at least 2004 (third or fourth user account): magic maverick

If the comment system doesn't even load comments even with nothing blocked, then it is crap and should be replaced. Despite all the bad things one might say about D2, at least I can load the fucking comments. Which I can't do with your new shit. Just a FYI. (And as others keep saying, without comments, there is literally no point in coming back.)

That's what I think about the new Slashdot Beta. It's awful. "There's simply nothing I like about [Slashdot Beta]. [It] need[s] to disappear, not get passed on to the next unfortunate recipient." In all the important ways it is unusable. It won't even load comments for me! It just says something silly like nah ah. WTF? So much for professionalism.

Oh, and I have JavaScript enabled for slashdot.org and fsdn.com so that shouldn't be a problem. (Unless they want me to whitelist some random other domains. Well, fuck that. I'd rather just leave.)

And without comments, /. is nothing. The comments are the only reason to bother coming here.

Go to Kobo <http://kobobooks.com>. Search for the title you want to buy. See that it says "Adobe DRM EPUB" or "EPUB (DRM-Free)". Don't pick any title with DRM. Pick the other titles. (For an example of an author with both DRMed and non-DRMed files, see Charles Stross.)

And don't feel bad. It too me a while as well.

Also, I remember reading that Tor USA titles everywhere should be DRM-free. If you get one that isn't, you can email them and they'll send you a copy that is DRM-free (perhaps).

Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe DRM is used by virtually all publishers (that actually use DRM) and device makers except Amazon. I.e. it is everywhere (sort of like how ePub is used by virtually everyone except Amazon). But, you don't have to use it. No device that I know of requires that an ePub file has DRM.

Two publishers in the SF/F field that don't use any DRM at all are Tor and Baen Books. Baen Books is excellent for other reasons, including their Free Library (you can download and read the first book in most of their series'). Tor is just part of one of the Big Six, and so otherwise has nothing to distinguish them from any other publisher.